The Virginian

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

People are hurting, and badly. The official unemployment rate may have fallen, slightly, but the real unemployment rate — the number of working-age Americans who aren’t working — rose from about 12% before the 2008 crisis, to about 23%, and hasn’t come down. That includes people who have retired early because they can’t find work, spouses who used to earn a second income but have gone back to homemaking because work isn’t available, self-employed people whose businesses have collapsed, young people who live in their parents’ basement because they can’t afford tuition and can’t find work.

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Sen. Paul told TheDC that he certainly felt like he was detained. “If you’re told you can’t leave, does that count as detention?” Paul asked.

“I tried to leave the cubicle to speak to one of the TSA people and I was barked at: ‘Do not leave the cubicle!’ So, that, to me sounds like I’m being asked not to leave the cubicle. It sounds a little bit like I’m being detained.”

Why would you tie up any of your precious inventory dollars in a car that doesn't sell and will catch fire?

DETROIT -- Some Chevrolet dealers are turning down Volts that General Motors wants to ship to them, a potential stumbling block as GM looks to accelerate sales of the plug-in hybrid.

For example, consider the New York City market. Last month, GM allocated 104 Volts to 14 dealerships in the area, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Dealers took just 31 of them, the lowest take rate for any Chevy model in that market last month. That group of dealers ordered more than 90 percent of the other vehicles they were eligible to take, the source said.

In Clovis, Calif., meanwhile, Brett Hedrick, dealer principal at Hedrick's Chevrolet, sold 10 Volts last year. But in December and January he turned down all six Volts allocated to him under GM's "turn-and-earn" system, which distributes vehicles based on past sales volumes and inventory levels.

The solar flare.

Monday, January 23, 2012

The Absolute Moral Authority of Being Black

Charles Blow

In today's column, The Genetic Fallacy, James Taranto does what Newt Gingrich did to Juan Williams in reacting to NY Times columnist Charles Blow who asserts his moral authority to call Gingrich a racist because, to quote his tweet:

This is reminiscent of Maureen Dowd’s anointing of Cindy Sheehan. Because she had a son who died in Viet Nam, Sheehan had “absolute” moral authority. In Dowd’s words:

“ …the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute.”

Today, the Left anoints black people, especially those whose ancestors were slaves with the absolute moral authority to call people racists who believe that - fifty years after the civil rights act was passed - it’s time to treat everyone equally.

Taranto reflects the views of many of us, especially the young when he says:

Nonetheless, to those whites for whom white guilt is not rooted in experience--those, including this columnist, who are too young to remember a time when full citizenship for blacks was a cruel fiction--the culture of white guilt can seem unfair and irrational, and can be a source of irritation and anger. Why is the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People respected while a National Association for the Advancement of White People would be considered racist? Why did Obama get away with calling his grandmother "a typical white person," when a white politician who made the same statement about a black person would be pilloried?

There are reasonable answers to questions like these--answers that are obvious to those who are old enough to remember Jim Crow or who have a sufficiently deep understanding of American history. What is not a reasonable answer is a hectoring assertion of one's own moral authority, either as a black person or as an enlightened white.

As with many unexamined attitudes, it may take the passing of a generation to eliminate old prejudices.

One cannot go backward. White supremacy is as good as dead, and white guilt is dying along with guilty whites of older generations. Both these developments constitute progress toward racial equality. The election of a black president was the most compelling dramatization this country has seen of the death of white supremacy. In our view, it is also hastening the demise of white guilt.

The question for people like Charles Blow is what kind of blowback the stoking of racial animosity that he specializes in will generate from a generation that doesn’t feel guilt because it isn’t guilty. The answer may be found in the reaction of the audience when they rose to their feet to applaud Newt when he said:

"I believe every American of every background has been endowed by their Creator with the right to pursue happiness, and if that makes liberals unhappy, I'm going to continue to find ways to help poor people learn how to get a job, learn how to get a better job, and learn someday to own the job."

For Blow to denounce these words that echo the promise of a better America is very, very troubling.

For reasons that are explicable only to Liberals, the predictions - of people who had not developed the wheel or metal tools, practiced human sacrifice on a really massive scale, and who shaped their heads to the point of imbecility - are believed by many who regard Christianly as mere superstition.

Saturday, January 21, 2012

According to the reported numbers, the drug-related murder rate was about 67 for every 100,000 inhabitants in Chihuahua last year, while in Afghanistan the civilian killing rate was an estimated seven for every 100,000 people living there.

There were more drug-related killings in Chihuahua than in any other Mexican state, according to the government figures. Chihuahua, the largest state in Mexico, includes Ciudad Juarez, a border city located across from El Paso, Texas. It is the deadliest city in Mexico and is considered one of the most dangerous places in the world.

I visited Juarez once. It must have been over 40 years ago. Two things I remember from that visit: (1)I don't like chicken mole, and (2) we were approached by an elderly man in a military uniform when we parked our car who asked for a little money to watch it and make sure nothing happened to it. We paid.

The Puppet's Court

Secretary of State Project.

There is a chilling undercurrent that is shaping our elections: the Democrat’s Secretary of State Project. What’s it purpose? To elect Democrats to the office of Secretaries of State in each state. Why? The Secretary of State of each state certifies the election results for that state. Other than the pay, why should anyone care about the party affiliation of the Secretary of State? The answer is simple, in close elections, especially where there are disputed ballots or recounts, the Secretary of State can make the difference between the winner and the loser.

Then, in Minnesota’s November election for U.S. Senate, Republican incumbent Norm Coleman finished 725 votes ahead of Democratic challenger Al Franken; the thin margin of victory, however, triggered an automatic recount. With Mark Ritchie [who credited the Secretary of State Project for his win] presiding over the recount process during the ensuing weeks, Coleman's lead gradually dwindled due to what journalist Matthew Vadum describes as a long series of “appalling irregularities” that invariably benefited Franken.

For example, during the recount process a number of ballots were found in an election judge's car; one Minnesota county suddenly discovered 100 new votes for Franken and claimed that a clerical error had caused them to previously go uncounted; another county tallied 177 more votes than it had recorded on Election Day; and yet another county reported 133 fewer votes than its voting machines had tabulated. “Almost every time new ballots materialized, or tallies were updated or corrected, Franken benefited,” writes Vadum. In addition, at least 393 convicted felons voted illegally in two particular Minnesota counties.

By the time the recount (and a court challenge by Coleman) ended in April 2009, Franken held a 312-vote lead. In June, Franken was officially declared the victor.

"I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how.”

There is now a growing body of evidence that the Democrats are going to make a concerted effort to steal as much of the upcoming election as possible. The regime’s “Justice” department under Eric Holder wants to make sure that no one will be asked for identification when voting; opening the process to fraud on a massive scale because they know that there will be no effort by the Feds to stop it. Election fraud has been given a green light.

Meanwhile the Secretary of State Project has committed a grave blunder by trying to frame the surprise Republican winner of the Iowa Secretary of State’s office.

A Des Moines man has been arrested after police say he used, or tried to use, the identity of Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz in a scheme to falsely implicate Schultz in perceived unethical behavior in office.

Remember Stalin’s maxim, the people who count the votes make the most important decisions. We are entering a lawless time where the unthinkable suddenly becomes entirely possible.

Biographical information on Edwards found on the Link Strategies website says that Edwards worked in new media for the Obama campaign beginning in September 2007 after joining the campaign as an intern organizing in the Las Vegas area.

Jeff Link, president of Link Strategies, confirmed Saturday that Edwards no longer works for the company.

“I am greatly disturbed by the charge brought against Zach, and understand the pending legal action will run its course,” Link said.

He added that within hours “of learning of this situation, I met with Zach and notified him he was no longer employed with Link

I also want to know more about his relationship with Reverend Wright. I want to know about his girlfriends, and ex-girlfriends; his classmates because that will tell me about the man behind the mask. I want to know what courses he took and grades he got in college because we are told by his groupies in the press how brilliant he is. Perhaps he keeps that brilliance hidden for a reason.

We are in the middle of a new election season and there is still time for us to learn about the man behind the teleprompter.

Rush Limbaugh: “Are journalists monogamous?”

The things that I do know are that this country is precariously balanced on an edge -- and if it goes the wrong way, the country as you and I know it is finished. What I know is, as I said yesterday: Whatever Mitt Romney's tax rate is, he's not responsible for that.

Mitt Romney nor Newt Gingrich nor Rick Santorum nor Rick Perry have anything to do with the economic misery in this country. That is traceable to one man and one location: Barack Obama and the Oval Office. Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Santorum have not played over 90 rounds of golf in three years while everybody's suffering. Gingrich, Romney, Santorum, the Republican nominees have not flown all over the world on the federal government's dime. They're not having lavish parties and concerts on the public's dime. They're not living like kings on other people's money.

Obama sends his wife on government jets four hours ahead of him to the same destination, or she decides to take the jet herself. The Republicans are not doing that.

Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich will be taking a pay cut. For Obama winning the White House was a path to wealth. For the Republican nominees all except Santorum, now, it will be a pay cut. Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Santorum. None of the Republican candidates are responsible for the 16% real unemployment in this country. They are not responsible for the increased fuel and food costs. They are not responsible for any of this. That would be Obama, who pretends to care about the middle class but lives like a king at the public trough. Mitt Romney's not the problem. Newt Gingrich is not the problem. Rick Santorum is not the problem.

We find ourselves in the mess that we are in, precariously balanced on the edge, because of Barack Obama.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Germany's solar power plants don't produce power when the sun doesn't shine.

Via Instapundit:

#GREENFAIL: Der Spiegel: Solar Subsidy Sinkole: Reevaluating Germany’s Blind Faith In The Sun. I’ve lived in Germany. They have faith in the sun because for most of the year it never actually appears . . . . No really. We went from November to May in Heidelberg and I think we saw the sun, like, once. So how can this possibly be a surprise?

Subverting the consensus

Politics is a profession with a practice that runs completely counter to its ideals. The best politicians believe nothing they say. Whatever commitments they make to the voters are left behind once they enter the white halls of government. Like police officers who are forced to become criminals in order to do their job right, they discover that the practice of their profession requires the comprehensive corruption of their ideals. Only by discarding their principles and commitments can they actually get the things they want to do done.

The successful politician does not believe in absolutes except when he is delivering a speech intended for the ears of the voters, what he knows to be true is that everyone has a price at which a bargain can be made. ...

"Forty billion dollars for clean energy subsidies? Ridiculous. My family will starve and my children will have to beg in the streets! Forty-two billion? Now that's more reasonable. Make it forty-three and I'll give you that cowboy poetry festival and steel tariff you wanted."

Think of Washington D.C. and every state capital and every local bunch of elected officials as a Middle Eastern bazaar and you come close to the truth. And while this system works well enough when stocks are limited, when the merchants can dispose of unlimited assets that they don't own and drive their constituents deep into debt to pay for their latest deals, then the real nightmare arrives.

The fact is that politicians operate within a consensus that is created outside of the halls of congress.

Politics is based around a consensus. The left does not operate on a consensus, it is a revolutionary movement and it works by subverting the consensus and presenting its revolutionary position as the new consensus. All that is left for the politicians then is to affirm the new consensus. This has happened over and over again in the lifetimes of even the youngest person reading this article and the process has been accelerating lately because it s a revolutionary process.

There are two types of conservative politicians. Gatekeepers and revolutionaries. The gatekeepers are consensus builders, they talk a great deal about traditional values, and are elected to keep change out. This defensive strategy is a dead end because the real changes are happening outside the direct purview of the gatekeepers, who usually lack the imagination and courage to do anything about them. When the left pushes hard enough, the gatekeepers fold and add the new order of things into their panoply of American values.

The gatekeepers will put up a vigorous show of fighting gay marriage and then ten years later they will proclaim gay marriage as the embodiment of our family values. They will make a great show of fighting Global Warming legislation, and then five years later they will say that our courage to confront climate change is the deepest sign of our values of responsibility for the world around us.

If you are a conservative, support the revolutionary.

There are few things more powerful and liberating than spitting in the face of authority, tearing down the sacred symbols and violation the taboos of those in power. In a democracy political power is based on a consensus. Defying that consensus, trivializing that consensus and walking all over it gets you called an extremist, but if you do it right then you have weakened the psychological power of the establishments over the minds of men.

Defiance is the fundamental virtue of the revolutionary. The left defied the accepted norms and values of America, and that defiance paved the way for a cultural revolution. The power of the left will never be broken until the right defies their values and norms the same way. Until it publicly destroys, mocks and violates everything that they consider sacred in the spirit of revolution.

Revolutions begin as culture wars against the established order and they connect cultural defiance to political change. The fundamental message of every revolution is a defiance of authority and if the revolution succeeds then those in power are forced to give way and accede to change. It can be done. That populist spirit is out there, it is abroad in the Tea Party, it is there in blogs and social media, and even occasionally on talk radio. But all that goes to waste empowering a political establishment of gatekeepers who sometimes talk like revolutionaries, but don't act like revolutionaries.

Why is the Tea Party revolutionary while OWS was not?

The answer is transparently obvious. Because it is the left that is in power. Why bother demanding an activist and progressive government when we already have one of those? At most the left can demand a "more" activist and progressive government, but how enthusiastic can protesters be about calling for more authority and more power for the existing system? That is why OWS was basically incoherent, it was little more than a loincloth for the naked emperor already sitting on his throne and looking for the plebes to cry out for more chains.

The revolution of the left is the stratified revolution of Barack Obamas and Elizabeth Warrens, greedy political activists feeding at the watering hole of government and crying out for more. More power. More laws. More chains. Parse the rhetoric and all you get is the powerful demanding that we give them more power. This revolution of the greedy and corrupt would already be dead if it had not used the momentum of its ideological fervor to embed itself into every institution and seize control of the educational system and the cultural dialogue to program succeeding generations to give it even more power.

Rush Limbaugh keeps pointing out that the establishment Republicans tell us that we can’t be mean to the Democrats because that will scare away the all-important “moderates.”

The time is ripe for a true cultural and political revolution of the right, but that revolution has been hijacked over and over again by the gatekeepers who warn us that it's time to play nice, that we must think of the long game, that some issues have already been lost and we need to fight only for the core issues that matter to them lest we alienate people. The long march never ends in a last stand, only another tactical withdrawal on issue after issue.

Let's show some contempt and ridicule ...

Revolutions begin with an open contempt for and anger at the existing order. The left knows that. It is why it fears talk radio and populism more than it fears the latest set of dapper gatekeepers we send to the Senate. The contempt and anger are here, the more they go public, the more the power of the left is shaken.

The attraction of Newt Gingrich is that – when he defies the MSM, when he spits in their faces – he’s the cultural revolutionary that people want. They are afraid that Mitt Romney will be the caretaker who “fixes” some of the problems while staying within the consensus. That’s his M.O.

Mitt, Ron Paul, Santorum, and all the rest all want good press. Gingrich at his best knows that “good press” is a pact with the devil. The vast majority of the people who are not Obamabots know this deep down and rise to their feet when someone who is vying for leadership shows he’s not afraid. “Fight the power” was once a slogan of the Far-Left, it’s now owned by the people.

Just to put 2 million days into perspective, that's 5,475 years of vacation time. There's no indication of how many employees are sharing that pool of vacation time, but if it were just one, they'd just be finishing a stint of paid time off that started in B.C. 3467, that is just around the time when the Sumerians invented writing and the Sahara started turning into a desert.

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Chris Matthews, the Larry Craig of Political Punditry.

Poor Larry Craig. The Left really enjoyed bringing him down because he had a reputation of being a pro-family and anti-gay marriage kind of guy. So there was a lot of enjoyment on their part when he was caught trolling for gay sex in a Minneapolis airport bathroom. “Anti-gay guy is gay” was the theme of a lot of the stories.

There are a lot of others versions of this theme in popular culture. American Beauty comes to mind where a macho guy is in reality homosexual.

To burnish his non-racist credentials he imagined that when Newt Gingrich called Juan Williams “Juan,” Gingrich was being racist.

The exchange between Williams and Gingrich during the South Carolina debate was a classic. It was a home-run for Gingrich who received the only standing ovation for any speaker during the Republican debates. See it here:

Note that Gingrich used expert timing when he addressed Williams as “Juan,” pausing just half a beat and giving the audience a moment to react –which they did.

The problem was that Matthews – like many liberals who are marinated in racism – perceived this to be a slight of a black man. Instead, it was a slight of the media, and done with exquisite finesse. The racism of Matthews who comes to the defense of Obama because he’s black and makes a point of “forgetting” that he’s black are great examples of a man overcompensating for his inner feelings.

Matthew is racist just as Larry Craig is homosexual; both are finely tuned to perceptions of their own particular idiosyncrasies. Craig sees tapping the foot of the man in the next stall as a sexual come-on. Matthews sees a mild put-down of a member of the press who happens to be black as a racist “dog whistle.” Larry Craig denies to this day that he’s gay; Matthews denies his racism. Two peas in a pod.

What are the facts? The Left (see Andrea Mitchell and Chris Matthews) is trying to tell us that the reason we have more people are on food stamp because there are more people.

But here are the numbers, via Powerline: the money spent on food stamps has DOUBLED since 2008.

The population hasn’t doubled. Sure, we are in a recession; a recession that the Obama administration has had three years to fix and at which it has failed miserably. The answer of Team Obama is not to get America working again, but to pay people to be unemployed for 99 weeks and to give them food stamps.

The Obama administration sees Detroit and likes the model. "Prolonged Death Spiral."

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

THIS is the reason Newt Gingrich is still in the race for the Republican nomination. He is willing, and able, to give it back to the Liberals in the media in a way that people can understand, and enjoy. Who with a trace of red blood in his veins does not enjoy watching Newt cram the ball down Juan Williams' throat?

Friday, January 13, 2012

Going North for the Winter.

Snowbirds.

There is an entire culture, mostly retired people, who go south for the winter. Getting too old to shovel the driveway or go to the market in sub-zero temperatures, or drive on slick roads they go to Florida ... or Arizona from December to April.

I have lived in Virginia for a quarter century. Virginia has an “in between” climate: it’s winters are not terribly cold – last Christmas we got a magnificent (if unusual) layer of snow.

But mostly our winters are in the 40s with a mixture of sun, partly cloudy … to rain. For someone who grew up in Michigan, the winters in Virginia lacks conviction.

For over a decade my wife spent the first few months of the year that the Virginia legislature’s in session in Richmond.

On my own for about 10 weeks, I decide that I wanted the kind of winters that I remembered as a kid growing up on the shores of Lake Michigan. So I trekked to my home town to enjoy the snow in an inn that is mostly deserted in winter, except for the few couples spending the weekend away from the kids.

There could not be a more peaceful way to unwind than to sit by a fireplace reading a book while outside the snow if falling. Or going outside to walk to a coffee shop through several inches of snow.

Or to see ducks paddling around in open stretches of water in an ice choked river.

Or driving out to the Lake Michigan shore to see the icebergs building up, and see no-one else around.

It’s the solitude as much as anything. Most people head south for the winter. If you want to be alone with your thoughts and your memories, you head north.

Mark Meckler, taking a plane from New York City has his personal firearm in a locked case inside his luggage. He is asked to sign a form at the ticket counter saying he has a gun in his luggage. The police are called, arrest him and take him to jail.

On December 15, 2011 at approximately 5:15 a.m., I was at LaGuardia International airport preparing to check in for a flight out of the city. During a routine check-in, I requested a firearms declaration form from the ticket agent. It was my intent to declare and check my unloaded firearm.

I purchased this firearm legally, and I have a valid concealed carry permit for it issued in California. The unloaded gun was locked inside a TSA-approved travel case, and the case was locked inside my checked luggage. I carry the firearm for my personal safety, having received numerous threats due to my role in the Tea Party Patriots. I have checked this firearm at airports dozens of times before, all across the country.

As I traveled through LaGuardia that morning, I passed TSA signs telling me I had the right to check this unloaded firearm in my luggage, and that I am required by law to declare the firearm to the ticketing agent. This is exactly what I did.

The ticketing agent provided me with the declaration form, and I signed it and returned it to her. She advised me that she would need to call Port Authority police to inspect. This is not unusual when traveling with a firearm. Procedures vary from airport to airport, from airline to airline, and even from day to day, and as a law-abiding citizen, I have always been happy to cooperate.

Unfortunately, that day, I didn’t realize that I was about to cross paths with New York City’s anti-Second Amendment stance. Upon showing my case and the weapon to the officer who arrived on the scene, and after a few brief questions, she advised me that she was placing me under arrest for violating New York City’s firearms laws.

...

I was subsequently transferred, in handcuffs, to the Queens Central booking facility in New York City. I was charged with felony possession of a firearm with intent to do harm. I spent the day in Queens…in jail.

...

Now free and the charges dropped, they refuse to give him his gun back.

Bain Capital bought a money losing family owned firm that made photo albums and merged it with a company that made picture frames. They hired a management consultant to head the company and built a plant in Gaffney. The plant eventually employed 150 people. The company continued to lose money. To save the company the management streamlined it and – 4 years after opening the plant in Gaffney – closed the plant. The company became profitable and was later sold to Rubbermaid. It’s successful business today employing thousands of people.

Let’s review: Bain capital buys a company that’s sinking, builds a plant that hires 150 people and gives them jobs for four years. Is forced to close that plant to save the company from bankruptcy and makes it successful employing thousand.

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Where those billions went following the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that left a government-estimated figure of 220,000 people dead — and at least 1.6 million more homeless — remains a confounding mystery. Inside of the recovery effort, however, are unquestionable successes along with the failures. And, to be fair, because the money came in so quickly and in such great volume, much of it has been wasted or lost like so much rice spilling on the docks. Or stolen, like the sacks of rice from here which will end up in Haiti’s black market for food.

At the Port-au-Prince dock we see a ship unloading rice to feed the hungry people of Haiti but ...

But the economy of rice in Haiti says everything about the condition the country is in. The U.S. government subsidizes and “donates” ton after ton of rice in Haiti and in so doing has through the last several decades completely undercut Haitian rice farmers and left them destitute and migrating into cities where they live in hovels that were destroyed by the quake.

The answer to where the money went:

But, really, over the last two years, the effort to assist post-earthquake Haiti has mostly benefited — or at least subsidized — the aid and relief institutions and private corporations that nominated themselves to help Haiti in its 2010-based time of need.

And Land Cruisers for the NGOs.

And if you really want to see the face of humanitarian spending post-earthquake in Haiti — the financial clout of the NGOs — there’s only one place to go: the Toyota dealership in Port-au-Prince.

As with any cataclysm or war zone, a white Toyota Land Cruiser is perhaps the ultimate symbol of international interventional power. And in and around Port-au-Prince, the vehicles are omnipresent. At the dealership, a modern and well-tended building on the city’s airport road (with mirrored-glass windows from floor to ceiling and a perfectly buffed showroom floor).

Inside the dealership, we finally run into nice woman in some sort of managerial position, (don’t use my name, she asks). We ask her how sales have been.

“Oh,” she says. “We buy a lot of Land Cruisers for sale to the NGOs. But, you know what? A lot come from Gibraltar, too. Loaded off cargo ships that the NGOs bring for themselves. You can tell those, they say Gibraltar on the back, sort of near the license plate. I’d say — here?— the numbers are probably 50 percent from us and 50 percent from Gibraltar.”

But business is good?

The woman is leaning against a desk in the sales office. “I’d say that, for us, 95 percent go to the NGOs, some go to rental agencies, which then rents them to the NGOs and others. But, you know, for all of the Land Cruisers in Haiti now, we also do the maintenance and repairs, if they get in accidents we fix them.”

How much does one cost?

“Each one, with taxes, is $61,100,” she says. “If you have tax-free status, you can get them for less, but then you have to take them with you or give them away here. If you pay the taxes, you can just sell the car.”

And how many do you sell a year?

The woman holds up her hand, right index finger pointed to the ceiling. “One second,” she says.

She disappears into an outlying office, then returns a minute later. Smiling. “This year, we sold 250 of this model. But, you know, right after the earthquake, for several months, we were probably selling that many Land Cruisers every month. Maybe twice that many.”

I start doing the math in my head. Let’s see: 250 Land Cruisers at $61,000 each is, like, upward of $15 million dollars. So even if they sold only a few more Land Cruisers in 2010 after the first few months (and you have to assume they did) plus the 2011 sales numbers so far (it is December as we’re reporting this), well, conservatively speaking that’s a gross cash influx in the neighborhood of $100 million in the last two years (though of course, some will have to go to taxes). Add to that the repair and maintenance fees, and you’re looking at maybe $110 million. Maybe $150 million. And that’s a conservative estimate.

The Los Angeles Times recently reported that, after a spate of burglaries at a veterans hospital in California several years ago, authorities set up video cameras to catch the perpetrators. In short order, nurse's aide Linda Riccitelli was videotaped sneaking into the room of 93-year-old Raymond Germain as he slept, sticking her hand into his dresser drawer and stealing the bait money that had been left there.

Riccitelli was fired and a burglary prosecution initiated. A few years later, the California Personnel Board rescinded her firing and awarded her three-years back pay. The board dismissed the videotape of Riccitelli stealing the money as "circumstantial." (The criminal prosecution was also dropped after Germain died.)

But surely we'll be able to fire a government employee who commits a physical assault on a mentally disturbed patient? No, wrong again.

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

That’s old news. Move on.

One of the keys to the Clinton administration’s success in dealing with bimbo eruptions and other scandals was to tell the press that they were talking about old news, it’s time to … “move on.” There was an entire movement that went by the name “Move on” that not only helped Bill Clinton weather his political scandals but helped elect Barack Obama.

Suppose that George Romney learned a lesson from Move On?

Stay with me here. The "Move On" concept was tremendously useful not just to Clinton but also to Obama. The skeletons in Obama’s closet: Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, even Tony Resko were quickly dropped by the MSM after receiving just enough mention to deflect the accusation that they never mentioned them at all.

“Sure” the media big feet would say, we wrote about Wright's “God damn America” ... once; Ayers was just a guy in Obama's neighborhood and Resko was a guy that the Obama's bought a lot from. We covered it. And that was it. When the media wants to cover something they remember the secret of advertising: repetition. A single ad doesn’t work; repeat it often enough so that everyone can sing the jingle and it sells ... big time. That’s the way it works and the MSM knows it. When the New York Times decided that the Augusta National Golf Club should admit female members - a story that no one cared about - they ran over 50 stories, as did the Los Angeles Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The Washington Post and USA Today only ran over 40 stories, all to help a feminist with an axe to grind. They almost got that venerable club to cave, and the only people who cared were the editors at the MSM. The rest of the country still doesn't care.

So pivot to Newt Gingrich and the rest of the team trailing in the wake of the Romney coronation. It should be obvious by now that unless Mitt Romney commits suicide, he will be the Republican nominee. Why would reasonably intelligent men like Gingrich continue to attack him when the best strategy would be to drop out and seek a place in the Romney administration? No one is angry enough to run through millions of dollars just for revenge unless he's a lot richer than Gingrich. Here’s where the strategy could get very, very deep. Suppose they are raising the issues that the Obama campaign is going to raise so that Romney can call them “old news” and tell the media to “move on.”

To use a medical analogy, the attacks that Romney’s opponents are mounting are like an inoculation, designed to give Romney a slight fever but to allow his system to create the antibodies to ward off the much more vicious attacks that Team Obama is preparing. I believe that’s what some other commentator are implying when they say that these attacks are actually good for Romney. I would go further and suggest that Gingrich and some of the others are actually deliberately in cahoots with Romney. We’ll see if that’s true by his response.

Of course the MSM will not move on for Mitt Romney; he's a Republican. But by the time the general election rolls around the public will be supersaturated with "Mitt, the Wolf of Wall Street." He just doesn't look the part, or act the part. And the public will be ready to "Move On." Is he that many moves ahead? We’ll see.

Women prefer rock climbing to marriage?

The sociology of a credit card commercial from Citi.

Marriage does not work for women, now, because they assume the stability and power of the West is eternal. Never threatened, always "boring." This is a poor bet, and likely to work out disastrously in fairly short order. Food, oil, and other resources are tight globally, and an external shock (and there is ALWAYS an external shock) in the global system will push everything over. Not aliens invading, or zombie apocalypse, or Mayan prophecies, but a corn harvest failure in Brazil, or a Wheat harvest failure in Russia, the Ukraine, and Australia. The closing of the Persian Gulf to oil shipping for six months or longer. The Euro collapsing. Perhaps all of these, are enough to send the economy into a nose-dive and mobs of hungry people from the urban centers into looting marches on the suburbs. With a paralyzed and inept bureaucracy unable and unwilling to use force to stop it. In other words, the LA Riots writ nationally.

Islamic terrorism is the most democratic and representative form of war there is.

The commitment to non-violence depends on the assumption that while small numbers of fanatics might seek war, the vast majority of people do not. And even if they do want war, they want a humane war, not a genocidal war of extermination. Therefore even when such wars are fought, they do not reflect the will of the people, only that of a small group of fanatics.

That such a manifestly absurd belief that flies in the face of human history could be so widely held among the decision makers of the world's dominant civilizations is itself apt testimony to the decline and fall of those civilizations. Nevertheless this belief remains unshakeable.

Atrocities are attributed to a dictator and a few of his cronies. Remove the dictator, roll in the voting booths and then we need make war no more. But the rise of Islamic terrorism presents an explosive challenge to that worldview. There is no Hitler or Stalin of Islam. No small group holding power on which everything can be blamed. In the age of terrorism, it is the ordinary Muslim who acts as the killer. Who sheds his guise of humanity and kills.

Islamic terrorism is the most democratic and representative form of war there is. There is no draft. No government mandate. And no compulsion but that of the Koran. Of course in territories under their control, becoming a Jihadist sometimes is compulsory. But that certainly isn't the case in the West. While Western diplomats chatter about democracy, the Muslim votes with his bomb vest. And his vote is the decisive one.

Monday, January 09, 2012

Saturday, January 07, 2012

Know what’s really weird?

Know what’s really weird?

Amid all of the accusations from the usual Lefty suspects about how weird Rick Santorum is to bring his dead son home, there is something weird going on. It’s not new, but it has been building. And it’s really bugging the hell out of me.

In Friday’s Wall Street Journal Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, wrote “What Iowa Says About the Religious Right.” What he had to say was simple and correct. I’m not sure that anyone can disagree.

When Iowa caucus participants were asked to identify the most important quality in a candidate, 31% said "Can Beat Obama," 25% said "True Conservative," and 24% said "Strong Moral Character."…

These polling responses clearly lay out the upcoming challenges for Messrs. Romney and Santorum. Mr. Romney needs to convince Republican primary voters that he can be trusted with crucial responsibilities such as judicial nominations. Mr. Santorum, on the other hand, needs to convince voters that he can appeal to independents and win a general election campaign against President Obama.

That's dead-on right. With the exception of deep-dyed ideologues, mostly in the Ron Paul camp, the number one objective of everyone I know is replacing Obama, even if it means voting for Glenn Reynolds’ Zeeba The Syphilitic Camel.

What was interesting were the comments that his article received. There were over 260 responses and very many were from people who identify themselves as “fiscal conservatives and social liberals.” The very first one was by Jonathan Murray who writes:

The problem with the religious right is that it scares people away from the Republican Party who would otherwise belong there. One of the most missed stories in the media is that fiscal conservatives--particularly college educated ones and women--can't stand the sanctimoniousness of evangelicals and are, in some cases, frightened by them.

Reagan had the mix exactly right: he paid lip service to evangelicals, but spent no political capital fighting for their social issues. We are a diverse, heterogenous society. We don't always agree. But it is a legitimate conservative position--perhaps the only legitimate conservative position--that government has a limited role in our private lives.

Many of the people in the so-called middle aren't actually in the middle: they are more conservative than most Americans on everything except social issues. They're really closer to libertarian. These are the people who voted for Ron Paul.

Where evangelicals lose people is when they convert "principles to voluntarily live by" into rigid "rules for living," sit in judgement [sic] of others, and try to force others to adhere to their rules for living. This tendency towards fundamentalism is what happens in Iran and other Muslim countries and is directly contradictory to the lessons and teachings of Jesus.

So Murray compares Christians in America to Muslims in the Middle East, effectively calling Christian evangelicals un-Christian. That would be news to the apostles who were compelled by their faith to spread the “Good News” of Christ, and were martyred for their testimony. Since 9/11, the “socially liberal” members of the culture have found a new club with which to beat Christians. Realizing that the Spanish Inquisition and the Crusades were getting a little long in the tooth, and Hitler’s Christian credentials were not all that compelling, 9/11 and Muslim fanaticism came as a – forgive the word – “Godsend” to people for whom genuine religious belief was weird and crazy.

If you think that Murray is alone in his attack on Christians, please read the comments.

William Ledsham tells us that religion, like sex, should be committed in private.

Peter Venetoklis calls the “religious right” authoritarian. It seems to me that he has it exactly wrong; the dominant Liberal culture is attacking the people of faith who don’t see the analogy between the practice of religion and a sex act. It seems that most religious people want to be left alone to practice their faith without being told that what they do in public is obscene.

Barbara LeBey tells us that social conservatives are so scary that Democrats would vote Republican if only those social conservatives would just stop all their “religious ranting.”

Thomas Yason“I view any religious fundamentalism as a threat. Holier than thou types who are sure of divine forgiveness for any act are not to be trusted.”

Michael Closter believes that the "religious right wants to destroy the rights granted by the US Supreme Court."

Brian Jones: "The Religious Right is politically motivated and have the opportunity, if elected in mass, to affect my individual rights. That is not a phobia but a rational fear."

Religion poses a threat to freedom regardless of its promises to the contrary. Once in control, theocrats embrace the use of force to achieve 'divine will' on earth. Recall the Dark Age and witness Iran's descent into barbarism today.

Let us be clear, the Wall Street Journal is not some fringe website with kooks as followers. People post under their own names. This is a fairly sedate and restrained example of Christian bashing, but like anti-Semitism, it’s going mainstream in a big way. Fear of the believing Christian – or the Jew - is used as the lever to make people of faith shut up and hide their beliefs.

The irony of course is that the history of the last 100 years should have taught the lesson that Christians and Jews have more to fear from atheists than the reverse. Hitler, Stalin and Mao between them killed more Jews and Christians than all the religious bigots in history if only because technology made their murderous intent more effective.

We don’t even have to go back to the murderous reigns of these believers in the religion of man as superman. In this country we have a President who believes that people cling to religion (and their guns) "as a way to explain their frustrations." We have schools that prohibit their valedictorians from expressing their faith and universities that find religious belief a disqualifier for professors. We have “social liberals” who characterize Christians as anti-science and all that we hear from the Christians – who in many cases are scientists and engineers – is a bleat of “What? No we’re not.” In Egypt Christian churches are being burned, believers are murdered and services are held during the day because it’s too dangerous at night. In Nigeria the story is similar with Christians bombed and shot while the “caring” international community averts its eyes. It is hard to name a country where Christians are not under either physical or legal attack – simply for being Christians: places like Iraq, Syria, Indonesia, China, Viet Nan, India and even Merry Old England.

The only thing missing from this picture to bring back the good old days of the Roman Empire is Christians being thrown to the lions or crucified. Perhaps that is due to a shortage of lions and crosses.

Christianity remains the dominant faith in America, by long shot. We have to ask ourselves what the turning point was; the pivotal moment that made it respectable to bash Christians to their faces? It was not that long ago that we saw Bill Clinton, in trouble over a dalliance with an intern, carry an oversized Bible to church. Barack Obama still insists he’s a Christian, so there must be some political benefit to the profession of faith. Maybe it’s OK with the "social liberals" for Clinton and Obama to profess their Christianity because we all know they don’t mean it.

Santorum means it and that allows the atheists and the agnostic to openly declare their fears and their hates. The fear strikes me as weird. During most of this country’s history, religion has played a much larger part in public life than today yet at no time could this country have been considered a theocracy. I’m old enough to remember a time when most stores were closed on Sunday, when liquor sales were restricted, when porn could only be bought from under the counter and abortions were rare and mostly illegal. Did those times really make America the same as Saudi Arabia or Iraq under the Mullahs?

There is no question that this country has thrown off the moral code of Christianity. Are we better people for it? In "flyover country" lots of people still ask the question.

Two weeks ago I wrote in this space: “A nation, a society, a community is a compact between past, present, and future.” Whatever my disagreements with Santorum on his “compassionate conservatism,” he gets that. He understands that our fiscal bankruptcy is a symptom rather than the cause.

The real wickedness of Big Government is that it debauches not merely a nation’s finances but ultimately its human capital — or, as he puts it, you cannot have a strong economy without strong families.

Santorum’s respect for all life, including even the smallest bleakest meanest two-hour life, speaks well for him, especially in comparison with his fellow Pennsylvanian, the accused mass murderer Kermit Gosnell, an industrial-scale abortionist at a Philadelphia charnel house who plunged scissors into the spinal cords of healthy delivered babies. Few of Gosnell’s employees seemed to find anything “weird” about that: Indeed, they helped him out by tossing their remains in jars and bags piled up in freezers and cupboards. Much less crazy than taking ’em home and holding a funeral, right?

Albeit less dramatically than “Doctor” Gosnell, much of the developed world has ruptured the compact between past, present, and future. A spendthrift life of self-gratification is one thing. A spendthrift life paid for by burdening insufficient numbers of children and grandchildren with crippling debt they can never pay off is utterly contemptible. And to too many of America’s politico-media establishment it’s not in the least bit “weird.”

Update: The Santorum baby story has brought a lot of people out who are now telling their own story and are making those who criticized him even smaller in my eyes.

Who's "Weird," The Santorums or the Abortionists?

It seems that Santorum is not alone. Even Lefty Charles Lane of the Washington Post is there to defend him from the haters and Race pimps for whom the Culture of Death is a sacrament.

I regret that, unlike the Santorums, who presented the body of their child to their children, we did not show Jonathan’s body to our other son, who was six years old at the time. When I told him what had happened, his first question was, “Well, where is the baby?” I tried to explain what a morgue is, and why the baby went there. It was awkward and unsatisfactory -- too abstract. In hindsight, I was not protecting my son from a difficult conversation, I was protecting myself.

Christopher Knight writes for the “Culture Monster” a column over at ”The Incredibly Shrinking L.A. Times,” and guess what our progressive friend sees when he looks at this innocuous and obvious political cartoon of First Lady Michelle Obama: Believe it or not, Mr. Knight sees an “uppity Negro.” Those aren’t my words, those are his:

The caricature of Obama as a profligate queen relies on the racist stereotype of an “uppity Negro[.]“

Tuesday, January 03, 2012

It wasn't "science" but advocacy. They knew the results they wanted and found the data to support their pre-determined conclusion.

I feel rather unconfortable about using not only unpublished but also un reviewed material as the backbone of our conclusions (or any conclusions)...

Essentially, I feel that at this point there are very little rules and almost anything goes. I think this will set a dangerous precedent which might mine the IPCC credibility, and I am a bit unconfortable that now nearly everybody seems to think that it is just ok to do this.

Public hearings into a proposal for an energy pipeline from the oil sands to Canada’s west coast are being manipulated by foreign special interests. Foreign billionaires are hiring front groups to swamp the hearings to block the Northern Gateway pipeline project.

I was at the time a doctoral student at Rutgers Medical School, and my mother called me at the lab to tell me that Reagan had been shot. Knowing that there was a TV in the medical students' lounge, I walked over to the other building to watch. A group of black medical students were also watching, and cheered and clapped at early (and thankfully erroneous) reports that Reagan was not expected to survive.

Monday, January 02, 2012

Fearless Forecast for 2012

It’s 2012 and there are a few things that will happen this year with almost perfect certainty. The European Union will continue to dissolve; not all at once but in parts and pieces. It was predictable. Forget the headlines referring to emergency meetings of heads of state. Look for “root causes” as they say when referring to cultural rot. Germans, Greeks, Italians and Spanish have never been a great team and forcing them into a political and economic union only made sense to people who believed that humans, like mechanical parts, are interchangeable. They are not, and the differences are nowhere more starkly illustrated by this comment:

When I give a small bag of garbage to my hotel owner’s 14 year old son and he simply drops it out a window into the high rise window well from 8 floors up I ask “Why?” and his answer word-for-word is “Anything is possible in Egypt.”

When I am in Varanasi, India (possibly the filthiest place I’ve ever been) and constantly ask what to do with my garbage by way of a wrapper or paper the answer 100% of the time is “Throw it in the river.”

When I see building construction crews I go by every day in Rio de Janeiro sitting around on their asses I am amazed – the first 5 times.

The second thing that will happen is that Iraq will quickly revert to a one-party state. Saddam is still dead, but the country is Arab with no history of democratic government. Once the American military presence evaporated, it reverted very, very rapidly to the natural condition of Arab states. The dust had not settled on the parade ground after the last American troops left before an arrest warrant was issued by the Iraqi President for his Vice President and rival. This happened as suicide bombings resumed in the capital and elsewhere. Religious and tribal hatred does not die in a brief year or two, it takes a generation or more. We will now see the rapid unraveling of the gains made at great cost by the military under the direction of the previous administration.

To cover the failure of Obama’s policy, not just in Iraq but the entire Middle East, the blame will be placed on the Bush administration for starting the war in the first place. The roots of 9/11 and other attacks on Americans globally by the agents of resurgent Islam are airbrushed from current events. The history of Middle Eastern violence will begin with Bush; Obama’s decision to place politics over policy, destroying the fragile equilibrium in that unhappy country will not be allowed to enter conventional thinking. As we enter the fourth year of the Obama regime, it’s still and always will be Bush’s fault, world without end, Amen.